The Saga of Giselle
by Sat-Isis
Summary: The story of Giselle's origin, from London whore to Tortuga bride. Warnings: Prostitution, Language, Infanticide, Violence, Imprisonment, etc.
1. A Whore Named Bess

The darkness throbbed in the light of the smoky tapers and she throbbed with it. Tension had ruled their lives for months, but there lay the bright future: a child slept in the old, broken-down cradle. A girl-child.

"Boys are useless," her mother always said with a sneer. She had consulted astrologers and gypsy travelers. Her daughter's belly swelled with a female child – only then had they offered methods of removing the offending female from the womb.

Still, her mother paced about, eyed her belly, rung her hands, gnashed what little teeth she had left, struck her son, and with simpering air procured "gentlemen" who possessed a proclivity for fucking pregnant whores.

The labor had lasted all day and the old mother whores were present as midwives and witnesses. Precautions had been taken in the event that the child was a boy; an overlaying of blankets had been set aside.

Birthing a child was excruciating, it burned, but she did not cry out. Blowing like a horse and growling like a mad bitch, she forced her child inch by inch into the world. Her mother worried she would birth a son or die.

Her mother had screamed when the little girl had slivered her way out of her daughter's cunny and she swooped the child up to clean her and coddle her. The old mothers all smiled and nodded in approval.

The congratulations rung hollow in her ears and with great effort she passed the afterbirth as her mother cooed over the infant and danced about the room with it in her arms. The old mothers praised the peach fuzz of blonde hair and the blue eyes the color of bruises.

Daylight had passed and so had the noise and the women. She had been sleeping, now she looked at the infant and found its appeal lacking. Looking into the cradle she saw another link in an unbroken chain of existence.

She was a whore, her mother had been a whore, and her mother before her and so on. The women of her family had been whores since the Romans had taken London. A very long time. _How long before this one took part in the family trade_?

Just when her mother's beauty had waned she was deemed old enough to start _earning her keep_. _That is what a daughter is for, after all, a source of income and someone to take care of you after you were nothing more than a withered, old cunt_.

The overlay was in her hands - _how had she gotten out of bed_? – she meant to break the chain. She had seen it done before, on boys, and layered the blankets over the infant's face and placed her palm atop the overlay, the breadth of her palm applying pressure.

Her body swayed with the throbbing of the darkness and even after it was dead she did not lift her hand. _Plat-plat_ dripped the blood from her quim onto the floor. A gasp that could have been a shriek in the silence did not disturb her trance.

"Oh, Bess! What've you done? God damn you, you stupid slag!" Snapping her head around she saw the rage and anguish on her mother's face. Her face twisted into a rictus of mirrored emotion. Y_ou didn't take the overlay away_, she only sneered.


	2. Get Rid of It

Moving swiftly to the cradle the old whore shoved her daughter away and snatched at the overlay. The baby was dead. Bess watched, numb, as her mother tried to revive the child by picking it up and shaking it. The baby's face was blue and bruised. She laid the child back into the cradle with a wail and crumbled inwards in anguish.

Bess sighed in relief and leaned back against the edge of the bed for support. If her mother was sobbing…then it was really over. "Get rid of it," she said; her voice horse and thready, "I don't want to see it anymore." This shocked the old whore out of her sorrow and she flew into a rage. Her mother came at her like an animal, spitting and swearing unintelligibly, slapping and clawing at Bess. She did not resist her mother's temper, just closed her eyes and lifted her arms to cover her face.

When the rage burned low and the blows became too exhausting to deliver, the old whore bellowed for her son, "JOHN!" Bess collapsed on the bed and rolled towards the wall. "JOHN!" she screamed again for her son and wrapped her dead granddaughter in the overlay."JOHN!"

Slamming down the stairs she grabbed the boy's bag, full of stones, and placed her grandchild into the bag and tied it tight. John was lurking for her at the foot of the stairs, wary of her screaming for him and expecting a beating. She thrust the bag into his hands and hissed at him, "Get rid of it."

John knew what the boy's bag was for; his mother had always told him how she wished she had put him into the boy's bag and dropped him into the river. The boy left the house smiling, a wicked smile he did not let his mother see. John did not go to the Thames; he went to the authorities.


	3. Worse Than the Favored Child

Torches snapped back at the darkness as the men made their way through the streets. The whores that still lingered were briefly illuminated by the torchlight; a pale thigh or breasts exposed hither and thither only to fade back into alleys, suddenly afraid, at the determined pace of the magistrate's men.

John should not have come with the men, but he wanted to see. Before the dawn crept above the filth of the Fleet, he would see both cunts sent down a peg; the only thing worse than being the favored child of an old whore was being the unfavored child.

The man's fist came down upon the door in three short and brutal strikes. When John's bewildered mother answered the door the stridulous voice demanded, "Where is the whore named Bess?" "I am Bess Clerkenwell, what do you want?" his mother replied.

"Bess the Younger," the man clarified, "we have a warrant for her arrest." John's mother stiffened and she looked again at the group of men and saw her son among them, hovering just beyond the shroud of the darkness. Her lips twisted into something resembling a smile, "She's not here."

The old whore tried to close the door in his face, but his thick arm shot out and slammed the door back. Knocked to her knees the old cunt spit out, "How dare you!" as the men walked over the threshold and dragged her up to her feet.

"Where is Young Bess?" the man demanded and Bess the Elder spat in his face. He backhanded her before he whipped her spittle from his cheek. "What do you want?" the old whore screamed at him and tried to kick at the men holding her arms back.

At the snap of his fingers, a younger man stepped forward and handed him a bag. "What is that?!" she screeched, knowing full well what it was. "Evidence," the main said as he reached his hand into the bag. "Evidence of what?" she demanded.

"Murder," the man said as his hand pulled a dead infant by its neck from the confines of the bag. Bess the Elder went dead white at the body of her granddaughter, blue and bruised red from where her tiny body had settled on the stones in the bottom of the boy's bag.

She started keening, an animal sound. Then she screeched, "Run, Bess!" A man punched her in the face and shut her gob before pounding up the steps to search for the murderess. Bess the Younger was on her bed, her face turned towards the wall. There was no place for her to run, even if she could.

The younger man found her first and rolled her over. Her mother's blows were starting to show on her pale skin; her hollow eyes and dry lips made her look like a wraith. The older man came into the room, still holding the infant by its neck like a broken doll.

Cocking his head to one side, he asked, "Are you Bess?" "Yes," she croaked out. "Is this yours?" the man held up the infant before her eyes. "Yes." The man had a hard face, "You are under arrest for the murder of your child." 'Yes," she said, "I killed it, now get rid of it."

The man's face did not flicker the least in regard to her confession, he put the dead infant back into the bag. It took two men to hoist her up and drag her off to Bridewell. On their way out the front door they passed Bess the Elder beating her son in the kitchen; it was not their place to intervene in family affairs.


	4. The Hardest of Winters

The hardest of winters had etched its mark upon her brow; two deep gouges in the skin between her eyebrows from cold, hunger, and illness. Her mother had used to look like her and now she was starting to look more like her mother than like herself.

Brought before the judge the first time for murder she had collapsed upon the floor from child-bed fever and was removed from the court; there was no fun in hanging a half-dead whore. Indeed, it might have been in the court's best interest to let her die in prison.

It felt as though her womb was being feasted upon by worms, worms with mouths like a cicatrix of teeth, and she was already dead and buried in the ground. Days and days passed and all she had the strength to do was grit her teeth through the pain.

One night she woke and the pain was less. She was hungry and trembled with the cold. The other women in the room, and their infants, were a source of noise she could not stand. Placing her hands over her ears and gritting her teeth she tried to sleep again.

Not a soul had come to visit her, though she half expected her mother to be arrested as well because Fate was cruel in her own way. Each day the pain grew less until it remained as a deep, throbbing ache; a shadowing undulating in the darkness of her.

She was taken from her cot in the room of miserable mothers and their newborns and placed with the general population of poor women in a dark, dank cell with no light. The lice crawled all over her and the hem of her skirt was wet from the overflowing piss pot.

Some of the women in this cell were mad and better suited to Bedlam. They screamed. Sometimes they did not sleep. They spoke to her as if she was someone else, stroking her hair. Had there been light in the cell, she would have seen the rash on their skin.


End file.
